Ah yes, that was the other thing that got revealed at the weekend: Radical are working on a sequel to their open-world eviscerate ‘em up, Protoype. A cinematic trailer (posted below!) introduces the new lead, a soldier who, having survived the first game, has now been all mutated and stuff to take down the original protagonist, the murderous/monstrous Alex Mercer. Well, whatever, I am just looking forward to some more running up buildings and making giant spikes explode out of the ground. That’s the stuff.

I wanted to play the first, but there were just too many good titles to preoccupy me.
This one looks interesting, but given what I know about the next year or two, I imagine the same thing will happen.

I think it was unfortunate that it was set in New York as it made the comparison with Spiderman 2 pretty inevitable and that’s not something that does it any favours.

Partly it’s that webslinging is just a more fun way of getting around.

Partly, for me at least, killing all those guys who were probably just doing their jobs made it less enjoyable than trying to be a hero. If I’m going to be evil in a game I at least want a certain moustache twirling flare. The brooding anti hero thing lost its appeal not long after puberty.

Personally I just use Prototype for unwinding, I think it’s great for that.

There’s something oddly relaxing, entertaining, and even uplifting in its silliness about slapping military helicopters out of the sky with a Mr. Tickle arm. Prototype really did have some magnificent moments of pure silliness, despite being mostly yer average mainstream tosh. I wish more games were a bit on the silly side, truth be told. But I was always more of a DeathSpank than a Call of Duty m’self.

I just think it’s a very absurd game, almost impossible to take seriously because of the nature of the powers. And there are even some great moments of grand comedic bastardry, where one steals the body of a soldier, and then accuses another soldier of being the Prototype.

That’s actually why I feel conflicted about Prototype. It’s obvious which (braindead) demographic they were trying to appeal to with it, but there are moments in it which make me think that there’s another game in there, just struggling to get out, one that’s entirely more oddball and just zany for the sake of it. I wish I could’ve played that game instead of Prototype, to be honest.

They have the makings of a truly great game with Prototype, they just need to embrace what it wants to be at its core, and get rid of this silly veneer of AAA mainstreamness they have spread over the top of it. It really doesn’t fit it, and I think that’s what a lot of people spotted was ‘wrong’ about the game without consciously realising that, exactly.

While Prototype’s story is nothing to write home about, one good thing about it was complete absence of any kind of moral standpoint. You’re not a villain, you’re not a hero and you’re not an anti-hero either. You aren’t concerned about morality at all. It’s a vengeance power trip.

That’s a pretty loaded way of looking at things. The narrative is about someone who has no view of morality. You can consider him evil, but the point is that the story is about a protagonist who stands outside of the morality spectrum. That does not a villain make. Or anti-hero. Or any other word to define socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior patterns.

I think that part of the game was (inadvertently) brilliant. Your powers are so massive that human beings are very much like ants to you. Everyone starts out trying not to cause collateral casualties among the civilian NPCs, but you become so obscenely powerful that you cause deaths just by walking around. Eventually the player gives up and adopts the protagonist’s frame of mind and doesn’t even notice when people die.

If you think that having no concern about morality means that you’re absolved from being evil or anti-hero, then maybe you don’t have much understanding about morality at all. Psychopaths have no moral standpoints, because they have no empathy. Being psychopath doesn’t meant psychopath is not evil. And since psychopaths make 1-2% of most populations, it is not so unusual to come and find one on the forum, for example.

The narrative is about someone who has no view of morality. You can consider him evil, but the point is that the story is about a protagonist who stands outside of the morality spectrum.

If you think you’re standing “outside the morality spectrum” then you are, in fact, an evil villain.

You never see someone showing kindness and compassion and proclaiming, “I help other people because I’m beyond the silly concepts of good and evil.” People who say that sort of thing are usually trying to justify killing or hurting someone.

When it comes to morals: The best part of prototype was the post-mission statistics, listing how many billions of dollars of army hardware had been destroyed, how many hundreds of military & civilian casualties, etc.

The second best thing about prototype was the boss fight against a giant monster erupting from underground- the sheer fact that you were dodging behind *skyscrapers* for cover. More of that, please.

Trouble is, no one forces you to massacre civilians at every turn. Me, i played and liked Prototype quite a bit and will probably like the sequel, but you know what? I actually try to minimize civilian casualties. Web of Intrigue target, i go for it, Blackwatch trooper, it’s a massacre, cop or Marine? As little as necessary. Yup, I only attack grunts if I need to, that is, to save my own skin. Heck, more often than not I go smash that infected who’s attacking a civilian or even don’t use any powers and just kick the crap out of it, so I don’t blow my cover and still help in a way.

That is to say, why not play and judge by your own morals instead of those you assume were “forced” unto you? Because as you can see they aren’t forced in any way.

“If you think that having no concern about morality means that you’re absolved from being evil or anti-hero, then maybe you don’t have much understanding about morality at all. Psychopaths have no moral standpoints, because they have no empathy.”

You seem to consider morality as an absolute. It isn’t. Morality is a set of cultural rules the society embodies. It is possible for people to be amoral without being immoral. Psychopaths, or rather sociopaths, which I am lead to believe is the more correct of the two terms, to the best of my knowledge are not amoral by default. They are perfectly capable of understanding and engaging cultural norms. They are just not able to feel empathy, which makes them to morality what lawyers are to justice.

In Prototype, Alex Mercer disengages from morality. It is possible for Mercer to be evil, from society’s standpoint. That is a label that has a meaning only within the morality bubble, however, and Mercer is well portrayed as a person who does not identify with it. It has no bearing on the story, as told from his point of view. In an otherwise mediocre narrative, this point is carried across adequately. Even better when the sequel is told from the perspective of someone within the morality bubble (although I expect the Prototype 2 protagonist to fade from morality with all haste and righteous fury to be stripped down to a pure vengeance power trip, just like we saw Mercer undergo a similar transformation).

Take the Predator movie franchise. Predators aren’t evil by any stretch of imagination. They operate under different cultural rules than we do and while they can be hostile, aggressive, murderous and generally ill-behaved they are not immoral. The same goes for Aliens. And the Borg. And Godzilla, the Cloverfield monster, more mature interpretations of Galactus, etc.

I agree with this fellow, I enjoyed Alex’s lack of morals, but he never appeared evil to me in particular. Evil in my mind implies a certain amount of malice, which Alex really didn’t have, he just didn’t mind that he was killing and maiming a great many innocent people. Certainly not the best guy around, but evil? Seems a bit strong to me. Even seemed to legitimately care about Dana, which was somewhat unexpected, so he may even have an internal set of morals, they just don’t frown all that much on collateral damage.

I agree quite entirely with Dawngreeter, to be honest, his(?) intellect is pleasing. Not many people understand the nature of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as presented. I think that ethics are actually more important than moral absolutes, I think that’s always been the case. The problem with moral absolutes, as in ‘this person is absolutely good’ or ‘this person is absolutely evil’ is that it discludes the complexity of life.

A person is made up of motivations, and these motivations can be incredibly complicated things in and of themselves. Please don’t forget either that motives are entirely subjective, because we can only understand the world from our own perspective. Let’s say that someone acts on a motive, and it has negative consequences, can you then say that the person is evil because it looks like they’ve committed an evil act? I don’t think you can, I don’t believe in absolutes.

I think absolutes are just a whitewash, really. We want to believe the world is simple, so we dress it up in moral absolutes to make it easier to understand. This leads to binary thinking: 1 is us, 0 is them, 1 is pure, 0 is corrupt, 1 is good, 0 is evil, 1 can do no harm, 0 can do no good, 1 is god-fearing, 0 is gay, 1 is caucasian, 0 is foreign, 1 is superior, 0 is inferior, …and so on. I’ve seen so many people entrapped by binary thinking that it’s beginning to worry me a little bit that so many would find comfort in such an obvious simplification.

Here’s a favourite example of mine that obviously doesn’t fall into binary thinking: Let’s say that you have a child, and they’re raised in a family environment but one where they’re constantly tortured under the guise of a loving family, where the family members keep constantly giving them conflicting information to screw up their mind, until the kid finally goes completely batshit insane. Now, let’s say that the child escapes, grows up, and then engages in a merry killing spree; but only ever targeting parents.

When this foul murderer is brought before the law, he’s confused. He believes what he was doing was righteous, because he was killing torturers before they could bestow upon children the pains that he’d experienced. He doesn’t understand that he was doing wrong, because he believed that he was freeing people from torture. So does that make this person absolutely good, or absolutely evil? Is this person 1 or 0? This person is neither, you can’t fit this person into a moral absolute, this person simply is. And is rather broken, but neither absolutely good/1 or evil/0.

To be honest, I wish that we’d eventually move away from moral absolutes, because they’re something of a lie and they can’t represent the world or people as they truly are. I will always see moral absolutes like good and evil as abstract constructs of the human mind and nothing more, a way so that we can easily whitewash a situation. I mean, we can feel good about slaughtering hundreds of foreigners if they’re evil foreigners, amirite? So there you go.

My problem with moral absolutes is that they really are nothing more than binary thinking, and if binary thinking ever becomes standardised, then all hope for humanity is lost.

In your particular example, Wulf, the society would label him/her as 2 – mentally deranged (on account of really believing that all families are like his, and every parent is a torturer), and lock him up in nuthouse for good, refusing to label him/her as evil.
But yeah, I gen’rally agree wity you and Greety over there (who is a he, btw:))

“If you think you’re standing “outside the morality spectrum” then you are, in fact, an evil villain.”
Except the Prototype protagonist really was outside the moral spectrum – he was a newly sentient virus, without any of the social context that defines good or evil to humans.

His only reference point was Alex Mercer – a man described by the Corporate Psychiatrist as clinically narcistical to the point where he considered himself more important than the lives of an entire city. The great thing is that the Virus Mercer ultimately becomes more “good” than the real Mercer ever was or most of the human characters are.

If anything the moral of Prototype is that Humans are shitheads, Virus Lady (who’s name I can’t remember right now) was justified but ultimately lacked the ability to forgive because she was partly human and the only creature that actually makes “good” decisions was a blank slate virus.

I wasn’t very impressed with the first one. It felt like the scale was wrong, somehow. It’s a little hard to describe — it was like you were running around a model of a city, not the city itself. I think perhaps the player character was too fast, or something. I also couldn’t get behind the mouse/keyboard controls. I think it’s just plain better suited to consoleboxes.

Comments like these mystify me. How does a control scheme decide which platform is better to play a game upon? Whenever I have a game on PC that Mouse-and-Keyboard aren’t good at, I buy a peripheral that is better:

The official X-Box pad for Windows is still relatively inexpensive and turned Lego Star Wars into a real joy to play. I anticipate using it heavily to complete Batman: Arkham Asylum. The PC is controller agnostic, it really is. I just wish more devs would realise that.

Really? At the time, on the 8600 I had, I cranked up the details to full and had at least a constant 30FPS, I didn’t once experience stutter or any kind of visual lag. In fact, I remember thinking to myself how well they must’ve optimised it for it to run so well. The problem with this kind of thing is that anecdotal evidence isn’t actually evidence at all. What might not work on your computer might work on another person’s, and I can only give my own account of how it was, too, I’m certainly not going to say how that’s how it was for everyone, though.

Sorry about that, it’s just that one of my pet peeves is people talking factually about anecdotal recounts, it’s been one of my pet peeves forever, and something I’ve railed against quite often in various RPS comments threads.

As for the keyboard/mouse controls, I actually preferred them to the gamepad ones. I tried both, I gave both a good spin, and I actually found that I was able to play the game better on keyboard & mouse. Maybe it’s just my craptacular brain being weird again, but I did just fine. I completed the game and a good few of the challenges with the keyboard & mouse, so I didn’t find the controls that bad. Again, YMMV. The thing is with games is that they’re a very subjective thing, and I’m just offering a subjective counterpoint, since I actually thought that Prototype was a good port.

(Edit: Got the name wrong, happens when two people have rather green avatars and I’m not paying attention.)

Yes, but you used anecdotal evidence to push the more objective claim that it was a bad port, rather than saying that you’d had bad experiences with it. I was simply providing a counterpoint by saying that I’d had good experiences with it.

This, far more than Just Cause 2, felt like the game part was getting in the way. By the time you’ve unlocked the really enjoyable ways of getting around and combat abilities, the sheer volume of enemies thrown at your just makes doing anything a huge chore. And enemies just weren’t fun to fight – they were either made of tissue paper or took far, far too long to deal with, and most of the challenge came from simply not being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

The game felt like it needed something else beyond constant, constant combat and slaughter – or least some motivation to use some of your more subtle skills like ‘Decoy’. For me, at least, it devolved into Whipfist Whipfist Whipfist, because that just worked against everything and minimised the tedium. I’m honestly not sure what could be added without changing the core tone of the series, though.

You could, of course, cheat and unlock all upgrade options at some point mid-game, where it all feels comfortable and about right. That’s what I’ve done, and I actually keep going back to that because I find it a good venting aid, as I mentioned.

If it does, then I’ve been gravely misinformed and I must play it now. Otherwise, I’ll have to disagree with you on an entirely subjective basis and say that Prototype does this better because it does it sillier.

I reeeeeeeeeeeally don’t think Prototype was trying to be silly. I mean: it was, and quite spectacularly so, and I guess that’s what counts, but after the laughing at its OTT Emosity ends, what is left? Only tears. Only tears!

Prototype > InFamous because inFamous took itself far too seriously. And I say this as a PS3 owner. Yahtzee did it best when he described the main character as a bit of a Phil Mitchell, in a game that had no sense of humour whatsoever. I can’t help it, I value a game that actually has character. Not cheesy, tacky, pop-culture reference character, but something that’s genuinely original. Prototype had glimmers of that. InFamous… InFamous sadly did not.

My comment is mainly gameplay related – I think both games had the essentially exactly the same slightly po faced anti-hero plotline, if anything Infamous was more light-hearted.

Prototype felt like a 10 year old arcade game – if you took away all the shiny graphics you might as well have been playing maybe R-type or some other bullet death lite. Floods of enemies, burst powers, boss battles which take a bloody year to complete – at least Infamous skitted along at a nice pace and felt fun the whole way through.

Prototype was decent, but while the added vehicles/guns were neat additions, it seemed to come at the sacrifice of the absolutely amazing melee combat that its predecessor, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction offered.

Even the big super-soldier enemies and biggest mutants just requires whittling down with a sword until their HP ran out. The bigger enemies in Hulk, however, resulted in amazing knock-down, drag-out brawls through multiple city blocks, with you and your enemy grappling, throwing and pummeling each other for extended periods of time until one finally gave in. It honestly looked like a proper superhero fight-scene, which is something I can’t think has been done in ANY other game.

If Prototype 2 has more varied enemies, and more focus on melee combat again, I will love it forever. If it’s just more of the first, I’ll probably give it a weekend rental.

This I can’t disagree with on any level, and is filled with truths. If there’s one thing that Prototype needed, it’s variety in its villains. It truly did need that. It felt like only Alec Meer Alex Mercer got the truly fun toys to play with, which was strange considering that the other infected seemed more powerful than him.

It’s not even a case of villains. Hulk had Hulk-sized mechs introduced as standard enemies quite early on, and they were fast, agile and capable of actually trading punches with you for a while. Later on they got replaced by elite Hulkbuster mechs, who were a proper challenge to fight, and Super Hulkbusters, which were so big that you actually rode on them while tearing chunks off them. I actually can’t think of any enemy that you could really trade blows with in Prototype – the Hunter mutants knocked you back, and the super-soldiers just got you in an inescapable throw.

In some of those flashes, it looks like they’re giving the new player character a slightly more monstrous profile, which bodes well for having more of the hulkbuster bot type enemies. It always felt like the problem with the enemy variation was that Mercer was standard human size, so there was a disconnect between having enemies that stood out from the masses of standard zombies, and something that was sized at the point that the grapple/throw moves didn’t look ridiculous.

The solution I had in mind for the Prototype scale issue would be replacing Mercers ‘armored’ form with a larger, slower ‘brawler’ transformation that would have let him go toe-to-toe with the larger creatures, but provides the option of switching to your usual, more agile form and escaping.

If Prototype 2 goes that way, it’s a great decision. Having a man-sized character that can throw tanks looks weird, but make him ten feet tall and suddenly it becomes badass.

Also, I really didn’t like Infamous. It was a generic bald space-marine third-person shooter with your pistol, sniper rifle, grenades and rocket launcher dressed up as lightening-based powers, but they behaved exactly as they would in a standard shooter.

Yep, exactly that. That’s pretty much why I didn’t like it, said more eloquently.

For all the bad things you could say about Prototype, it wasn’t as lacking in personality as InFamous was, and it was actually quite good in that department, if mostly that department and not as many others. Hulk was better, but Prototype wasn’t entirely bad, and I still think that there’s a good game in Prototype, struggling to get out. They were just too scared of going Hulk-style OTT. They should’ve gone OTT!

Anyway, my verdict on this is that Prototype was underrated. In some ways, it was deservedly so; because it didn’t have a lot of variety, and it wasn’t all that long. But some parts of the game were a text-book example of how you can make a game incredibly silly and fun. Hulk did it better, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for Prototype.

And I will insist that there’s a place in any Hall of Fame for any game that lets you slap helicopters out of the sky with a bloody Mr. Tickle arm.

Oooh. That’s a good write-up. The way you tell it one wonders whether the viral-beasts were driven closer to the edge of survival than us, emulating the human of ‘Mercer’ only because the emulation of him was necessary to survive. Not a perfect Mercer, but one intelligent enough to help them survive. And the game does rather hint at such, so the idea hadn’t escaped my attention. This would too, of course, make perfect sense.

It would be an entertaining concept as well; in Prototype, you are the emulation, not the person. You simply exist because the viralbeast-thing needs you to guide it, to ensure its own survival. And that’s what you’re doing, you’re keeping them alive, so that they can spread and propagate. If it had gotten to the point where it had no longer needed the Alex Mercer psyche to survive, it probably would’ve wiped it.

And that’s what Prototype feels like, it really feels like a beast trying to survive in an urban jungle, one that’s parasitically stolen the brain of a human, and is trying to use that mind to understand what’s going on, and how best to get out of this alive. Since that is the primary goal for any living being.

“A cinematic trailer (posted below!) introduces the new lead, a soldier who, having survived the first game, has now been all mutated and stuff to take down the original protagonist, the murderous/monstrous Alex Mercer. ”

Fucking sequel-itis. Prototype was a great standalone game, and I really wish it could stay that way. I can already predict the plot of this game: Guy gets powers to defeat Mercer, goes too far and gets military mad at him, kills Mercer and discovers that he’s the new bad guy.

Oh Prototype I kind of enjoyed you but ultimately got bored of the sandbox.

It wasn’t you Prototype, not totally. It’s partly my fault. I always get bored of the sandbox; it’s just a question of when. Unfortunately I can’t enthuse about your particular box as much as better boxes like Vice City (I completed it before getting bored!) or Minecraft (I got hours of fun before getting bored with its charms) but it was fun enough for a while.

I enjoyed the silliness, I enjoyed taking over other’s bodies, I enjoyed the gliding around and wanton destruction. I enjoyed the inflitrations, I enjoyed climbing to the highest peaks, I enjoyed chucking around cars. But then I got bored, and when I got bored of arseing around the narrative and character just weren’t strong enough to complete the game part. Plus the game part kind of hastened the boredom by making getting around the place more of a chore (but if it hadn’t been around i would have got bored anyway so at least it tried something).

So yeah, I probably wont be buying the sequel untill it goes into a sale and it may well take some enthusiastic views on it from others to push me over the edge to buying it. I do like how they’ve realised Mercer was a dick and that everyone will enjoy going up against him though.

Yeah, that’s my point of contention with Prototype, summed up eloquently. Underneath it all, there’s a very silly game bursting to get out, but that feels restrained, held under lock and key, and actually dialed back (until later on in the game, where the enemy forces become almost insurmountable). It feels smothered by its more mainstream plot, something that it could’ve done better either without, or done better. The thing is, Prototype is a wonderful case for what I’ve always said: If you can’t write, don’t bother trying, your game will be better if you don’t bother. If you can write, then your game will be better than if you didn’t bother, but understand when you either can or cannot.

So the way I play Prototype is in a very cheaty way, to have all the powers at about the mid-point of the game, before it becomes too overwhelming. And I just hop into it when I want to vent, because it really is completely silly to almost Monty Python degrees. And I don’t care what anyone says, the superpowers were still some of the most innovative and original I’ve ever seen in a superbeing game. Mr. Tickle arm.

Yes, I’m obsessing about that, but only because no one’s really done it before, and it really was very funny.

I didn’t like Prototype, because they made the fundamental game design error of making the start AWESOME, then promptly taking away all the things that made it awesome.

Then when you get to that army base and fight the annoying thingies I got bored and haven’t gone back to it. Which is a shame, because that first twenty minutes were as fun as any game I’ve played for a long time.